Profunctor optics and traversals
From MaRDI portal
Publication:6333313
arXiv2001.08045MaRDI QIDQ6333313FDOQ6333313
Authors: Mario Román 
Publication date: 22 January 2020
Abstract: Optics are bidirectional accessors of data structures; they provide a powerful abstraction of many common data transformations. This abstraction is compositional thanks to a representation in terms of profunctors endowed with an algebraic structure called Tambara module. There exists a general definition of optic in terms of coends that, after some elementary application of the Yoneda lemma, particularizes in each one of the basic optics. Traversals used to be the exception; we show an elementary derivation of traversals and discuss some other new derivations for optics. We relate our characterization of traversals to the previous ones showing that the coalgebras of a comonad that represents and split into shape and contents are traversable functors. The representation of optics in terms of profunctors has many different proofs in the literature; we discuss two ways of proving it, generalizing both to the case of mixed optics for an arbitrary action. Categories of optics can be seen as Eilenberg-Moore categories for a monad described by Pastro and Street. This gives us two different approaches to composition between profunctor optics of different families: using distributive laws between the monads defining them, and using coproducts of monads. The second one is the one implicitly used in Haskell programming; but we show that a refinement of the notion of optic is required in order to model it faithfully. We provide experimental implementations of a library of optics in Haskell and partial Agda formalizations of the profunctor representation theorem.
This page was built for publication: Profunctor optics and traversals
Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q6333313)
